*Something* like surfaceSprites

[Boothand]

I want to make physical grass for my grass terrain, but I think sprites rarely look good when it comes to grass and plants. Instead, I want to generate grass on the surface, just like "surfaceSprites vertical" does, just that I don't want them to actually be sprites. I want them to be models or just planes that don't turn against the camera. The best would probably be .md3 models of chunks of grass evenly spread across the surface of the terrain. You might ask why not just import it into the editor and place it there, but in my case at least, I have terrain with lots of diagonal direction, hills and so on. It would be a lot of work lining this up in a good way, and it would look messy in the editor, and not least, you'd be missing the ssFade feature of the surfaceSprites (makes the sprites only within a set distance visible), which is good for framerate.

 

Any ways to do this?

 

 

PS. surfaceSprites aren't mentioned in the shader manual. 

[Asgarath83]

You can check how work the shader file of grass of dosunn t2_dpred map and using the shader command for your custom grass texture.

[Raz0r]

t2_dpred uses surface sprites.

The reason it's not mentioned in the general Q3 manual is because it was added by Raven for SoF/JO(?)/JA

 

Your next best bet would probably be deformVertexes on manually placed models, with LoD support.

[mrwonko]

Take a look at q3map_surfaceModel, it should do what you're looking for. Not sure how well it holds up with slopes, but I guess if you create the models with that in mind (i.e. lower them into the ground) it should work. Maybe create a separate model for slopes.

[Boothand]

That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll try this out!

 

Thanks!

 

EDIT: It works. Fabolous.

[Boothand]

Starting to look very good. Posting this just to conclude the thread, with what I've got so far using surfaceModel. Seems good on the FPS too. @@mrwonko, it works perfectly with slopes.

 

[Boothand]

-... with LoD support.

 

Can you confirm LoDs working for md3 objects? I've tried changing the model and adding _1, _2, _3 to the filenames, but with no results.

[eezstreet]

I don't think they work.